*Point’s fussiness and arch-purism in the treatment of the humble egg would seem to be without equal, but a later chef—none other than Bernard Loiseau in Saulieu—was to go even further in finicky perfectionism. Loiseau did not even allow the egg to touch anything as vulgar as the direct heat of a pan. He cooked his egg, ever so slowly and ever so gently, in a buttered saucer reposing atop a saucepan of boiling water. (In a later refinement, he advised separating the yolk and the white, cooking them separately and reuniting them only at the end of the operation.) Can anyone go further than that? Mais, bien sûr. The celebrated Mme. Saint-Ange, author of a monumental tome of a home cookbook, picks one further bit of refinement: you must salt only the white, not the yolk, lest it leave unsightly spots.